"Chicago Sun" October 20, 2007
Kenji Mizoguchi's "Doctor Sansho" is one of the best in Japanese film history, and the film is rarely named after its villain, rather than any sympathetic character. The mustache slave owner Sanjiao is at the heart of the film's two journeys—one toward him and one fleeing him—though the characters on the first road aren't yet suspicious of their destination. He's one of the most ruthless creatures I've ever seen on screen.
The film opens in a valley village. Tamaki, the wife of a kind-hearted magistrate, and her son Chef Wang, daughter An Shou, and servants are struggling on the mountain road. Here, the dense bushes of the 11th-century feudal era continue to appear in the film, reflecting the director's view of human nature: man and nature are two sides of a coin. When the husband provoked the cruel sansho and was exiled, the group had to walk on the road of escape, trying to rendezvous with the husband.
In this shot, and even in the whole film, Mizoguchi deeply implements the creative principles of classical video: the movement of the camera to the left indicates the existing events, and the right is the future time. Diagonal movements go in the direction of extremely sharp angles. Upward movement symbolizes hope, downward movement is ominous. The figures move from the upper left corner to the lower right corner, symbolizing their entry into an unpredictable future.
The group stopped for the night, built a rudimentary wooden shed and lit a small fire. The wolf howls in the middle of the night, and the family sits around the fire pit to form a circle. This is a family moment. However, they are about to encounter the unexpected again. An elderly priestess found them and entertained them at a nearby home. The next morning, after learning their destination, the priest suggested that the waterway could greatly shorten the distance, and said that he knew several reliable boatmen. As they left the house, an imperceptibly sneaky figure rushed behind them from the bushes.
Entrusting them to the boatman is a scam. Ladies and servants are captured by human traffickers - women will be sold to brothels, children will be sold to Sanjiao as slaves - and they will work for ten years in the original slave estate run by Sanjiao. Sansho is an unflattering sadist - surrounded by a bunch of flattering lackeys except for his son.
Flashback footage shows enslaved children as children with their father, who gives his son a talisman of mercy and warns him that all men are created equal - the same idea when Japan was occupied by the United States in 1947 It was imposed, and for sixty years, it has remained unaltered as a standard in the Japanese constitution. In Mizoguchi's 1954 film with a clear theme, he also implied his life-long focus on feminism, as well as his critique of Sansho slave estates (which alludes to Japan's actions in World War II). As the audience can see in the film's preface, the story takes place in "an ignorant age where human rights have not yet awakened from humanity." Through this, Mizoguchi may not only tell this story at the same time, but also explores the traditional Japanese totalitarian society, where each person's social role is rigidly defined, and authority is transmitted from the top to the bottom.
As the plot progresses, the audience sees Chef Wang and An Shou trying to escape, evoked by a song sung by another slave from the same village. The singing was euphemistic, like a sobbing: "King Cook, An Shou, come back, I need you..." came the mother's quiet singing voice. The film transforms these mysteries into magical images of sansho. Sanjo branded the forehead of the slave trying to escape. Sanjiao's son Taro is dissatisfied with his father's actions. The irony of the film is that when Taro applauds the resistance of the slaves, the chef king becomes very obedient, almost becoming Sanjiao's godson. Then he takes a turn, and in a beautiful, emotional scene, the film takes its final journey.
Mizoguchi Kenji (1898-1956) is considered one of Japan's greatest directors along with Ozu and Kurosawa. He won the Silver Lion Award at the Venice Film Festival for three consecutive years with this film and "The West Crane Generation" (1952), "The Story of the Rainy Moon" (1953), and has maintained this incredible record to this day. He is known for his beautiful composition and movement of the mirror. His "one scene, one mirror" theory is used in the famous suicide scene in this film - no characters are shown, only the ripples on the lake are shown. What's more, although his characters always seem to be carefully arranged in the picture, we know that he never instructs the actors how to stand and move, but simply convey the effect he wants. Just let the actors move on their own. This approach undoubtedly creates a subtle sense of untouched natural movement.
Although Ozu has always insisted on "one shot, one shot", his lens never moves - the composition and the picture are the truth. Mizoguchi's elegant camera movements almost create a fantasy world that allows the viewer to leave his field of vision and focus freely. The camera hardly moves away from an event, avoid focusing on them unless they are too violent or intimate.
Mizoguchi made about 75 films in his lifetime, but Sansho contains perhaps the most autobiographical drive. According to Wikipedia, Mizoguchi was young and poor, and his sister was adopted by his family, who was later sold as a geisha; his father was rough with his family. This may explain why the adaptation of a folk tale from five hundred years ago resonated so much in the director's mind.
Sometimes we have a hard time explaining why a story can shock us so much. As far as "Doctor Sanjiao" is concerned, it may be that the inescapable bad luck destroys such a good family for no reason. All this does not happen directly like a flood, but separates the family for many years to appreciate their own destiny. This gives the audience enough time to understand the cruelty of sansho: some people are born without benevolence and conscience, and want to do things that others can't.
At dinner last night, an old man in his sixties would think back to when he was six years old. His beloved cat gave birth on his belly at night. When he woke up, he saw the speckled little life meowing on his stomach, and was surprised to find that his cat trusted him so much that he didn't instinctively find a hidden corner, but gave birth in such a location. He uttered in a trembling voice what had happened, and then his beastly stepfather grabbed the kittens in front of him and smashed them to death with a hammer. I tell this story to point out the joyous tyranny of Sansho at work, and to allude to the war atrocities that Mizoguchi must have heard of.
Does this story have a happy ending? No, but it has a "resolution" (the resolution of the dramatic conflict in the play), reconciliation, forgiveness (though not to Sansho), it has the transformation of the Chef King, and the decision of his grand destiny. There's a lot more to it than that, but you can't feel it unless you watch it in person. When watching "Doctor Sansho", in a way, it is no longer a fable or narrative, but more like an elegy, which few works in film history can match.
New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane wrote these key words in his overview of Mizoguchi a few years ago: "I only saw Sansho once more than a decade ago: a broken man walks out of theaters convinced I have never seen a better work. I dare not read it again, I do not want to break this curse, and because the human mind cannot bear such torture."
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